Fast and Furious: “walked” grenade used in deadly shootout with Mexican police

There goes that Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News again, doing real reporting on a story the media pronounced dead and gone, five minutes after their pals in the Obama Administration told them it was no big deal…

CBS News has learned of a shocking link between a deadly drug cartel shootout with Mexican police last week and a controversial case in the U.S. The link is one of the grenades used in the violent fight, which killed three policemen and four cartel members and was captured on video by residents in the area.

According to a Justice Department “Significant Incident Report” filed Tuesday and obtained by CBS News, evidence connects one of the grenades to Jean Baptiste Kingery, an alleged firearms trafficker U.S. officials allowed to operate for years without arresting despite significant evidence that he was moving massive amounts of grenade parts and ammunition to Mexico’s ruthless drug cartels.

The gun battle took place last week in Guadalajara. Authorities say five members of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel used at least nine firearms and ten hand grenades against Mexican police. If one of the grenades was supplied with the help of Kingery, as believed, it adds to the toll of lives taken with weapons trafficked by suspects U.S. officials watched but did not stop.

I’ve written about the Kingery case for HUMAN EVENTS before, including a follow-up story in which we learned the ATF let him go after he was caught smuggling grenade parts and 2,000 rounds of ammunition in a spare tire.

In her new report, Attkisson reminds readers that “Mexican authorities finally raided Kingery’s factory and arrested him – they say he confessed to teaching cartel members how to build grenades and convert semi-automatic weapons to automatic.” He was sitting on enough parts to build a thousand grenades at the time. And now it looks like one of his grenades was used in a battle that killed three cops in Mexico.

Attkisson says the Justice Department won’t give her a straight answer about whether they’re trying to extradite Kingery to the United States. That seems like something they should be working on, now that the Great Shutdown Horror is no longer available as a blanket excuse for inaction and obfuscation.